Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Roswell hosted its annual UFO festival this weekend, remembering that strange flying saucer incident in July 1947.
So this is a good day to look back at another of our region’s unexplainable extraterrestrial events.
Early in the morning of Jan. 21, 1976, a pair of Clovis police officers – Corp. Randy Johnson and Officer Henry Perez – noticed a red, white and blue flashing light moving in the sky as they traveled west in the 400 block of West 14th Street.
Police logs show the sighting occurred about 2:30 a.m. The officers said the strange light appeared to be about two miles from their location.
Johnson said the light stopped moving shortly after it was spotted. It simply hovered in the Southwest sky.
Then the men noticed three more UFOs due west with lights flashing, evenly spaced and flying at the same altitude.
That’s when Johnson pulled out his binoculars and was able to offer a more detailed description of what he witnessed. He said the objects had red lights on the top, white or silver lights in the center and blue lights on the bottom. The red, white and blue lights pulsated at the same time, Johnson said.
The objects then moved slowly below the horizon and they were gone.
The story gets better.
About 5:45 a.m. that morning, Johnson and Perez said more objects appeared, some in the Northwest sky, some in the Southeast sky.
In all the police officers said they saw 18 UFOs hovering over Clovis in less than four hours.
Cannon Air Force Base was brought in to investigate the strange objects. Cannon called Albuquerque Air Traffic Control for a list of aircraft cleared to fly in the area that morning. The only aircraft operating was flying over Tucumcari.
A Clovis News-Journal photographer and amateur astronomer had to know more. They embarked on a “sky hunt” with help from the police officers and others.
Early on the morning of Jan. 23, 1976, from room 901 of Hotel Clovis, photographer Scott Price was able to capture an image of what appeared to be a self-propelled craft fully capable of independent movement.
The newspaper photo, which resembled a frown on a clown’s face, set against the night sky, appeared on the front page of that day’s paper. The caption reported:
“Unfortunately, the photographer could not get a good smile out of the shy subject. Hopefully, an appointment can be made for another shooting tonight – if the subject will just hold still. And say “green cheese” maybe?”
Everybody’s a comedian.
But we may not be alone.
David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at:
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